He might be right but during my time at Google (coincidentally without a degree), I never found Brin to have much of any idea of what was actually happening inside the company.
He seemed mostly checked out about a decade ago. Before Larry did. Basically right after G+ failed. More of a figurehead. And then not even that anymore.
Forget not having degree, to get even an interview call, you need to be T20 alumni! Shows how execs are out of touch day to day operations of big companies.
Interesting Microsoft is mentioned as recently dropping degree requirements. First time I worked there as an FTE without a degree was 2012. I don't see this as any sort of turn of events in the industry. It's always been "degree or equivalent experience" as far as I can remember.
This has always been true in tech. Degree’s pave way to leadership but skills opens doors.
If you have skills, you can get a job. If you have a degree, you can get a job. If you can GDB, you can get a job. You just have to go out and get one.
Why does the article suddenly start talking about power grids before jumping back to its topic like nothing happened?
> If you spent years and tens of thousands of dollars earning a degree, companies' hiring people without that credential might feel frustrating. The change could leave graduates wondering if their time and money were well-spent.
> AI's popularity also creates environmental pressures. Training and running AI systems requires tons of electricity and water for cooling data centers. As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, operations, and daily business functions, energy consumption grows.
> This can strain power grids, increase costs for consumers, and contribute to pollution if the electricity comes from sources such as gas or coal. AI may help optimize some clean energy systems, but its resource demands present trade-offs.
> What's being done about changing hiring practices?
The business community is recognizing that degree requirements often screen out talented people unnecessarily.
Sure, for a value of “many” meaning more than 10. I doubt it means anything close to, say, 10% of new hires.
Frankly it seems like a pretty weird thing to say to a group of college students. What does he want them to take away from it? “Just apply now”? “You’re not that great”?
When your most potent competitor companies (FB, MSFT, Apple) and investments (OpenAI) were all founded by college drop-outs, it does make you wonder whether college itself was holding these individuals back. I'm sure they are exceptions rather than the rule.
Anecdotal, but some of my best hires were either degree-less, or had education in an unrelated field.
I think degrees are useful for comparing candidates with no experience (work or project experience, that is), but beyond that have little value. Especially when the candidate's university years were a decade or longer ago. If you've been working for at least a couple years I won't really look at your education at all.
The type of roles w/ non-degree holders matters here. I'm sure Google offers a great career in any of its roles, but the article makes it sound like positions Stanford grads apply to (PM + eng) already have lots of non-degree holders. Pointing at company-wide stats to support that claim is weaksauce. Over a third of Google employees are not engineers/PMs (if this is true: https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/google). Who's to say the vast majority of non-degree holders aren't clustered in their sales and support org? I think the 77% stat is a great signal, love to see reduced gatekeeping in any job market. But, signaling you'll find folks without degrees in eng squads across Google doesn't seem obvious.
This is not very surprising. I've always thought that it's more of correlation than causation. If you're a good problem solver, then there is a good chance that you are probably good at both college admission and software engineering. So companies have been using it as their proxy for hiring because... why not. I'm not saying college curricula are useless, but this dependency on (imperfect) correlation might have caused significant opportunity costs for talent acquisition and now companies are slowly acknowledging it.
CTO of a startup. built the entire cloud backend and added features as a sole backend dev for the first 3 years. Before that I worked for several years in SF as a developer working all the way from a self taught junior to senior engineer to now a CTO with 4 engineers working with me towards out series A.
Some of the best engineers I know don't even have a college degree.
with that in mind, It fills me with general revulsion at the idea that "overlooking credentialism as long as they can do the job to a high standard" is "concerning." I want new engineers to have access to the same Ladder I had access to when I was up and comming.
On the other hand, I know plenty of devs with a degree who are not very good. So should we conclude that have a degree is not very correlated with dev skill?
It's not that hard to notice this, just google "{university} {degree} syllabus" and you can see all the courses that the student will take.
In my case, I have CS degree and work as SWE but I probably would've been fine with just my Data Structures & Algos course as I already had programming experience.
Are computational theory, circuits 101, discrete math, logic 101, etc necessary for being a good SWE? Probably not, but they do probably expand your mind a bit.
As far as I know, Google never had a requirement to have a degree for any software engineering job. What they did pretty aggressively, though, is sourcing candidates from universities with top-notch engineering programs (CMU, Stanford, etc). So they ended up with a significant proportion of such hires not because they rejected everyone else, but because their intake process produced more leads of this sort and treated them preferentially. Basically, for applicants going through that funnel, they guaranteed an onsite interview.
But they always had a good number of people with no degrees or degrees wholly unrelated to computers.
I remember when I was at the CMU Robotics institute in the graduate program (Robotics / AI) in 2003 and Google came on campus and they wouldn't even consider anyone without a PhD - the campus recruiter advised me to apply when I had completed my PhD.
Glad I didn't spend another 8 years and instead took a job at AWS.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 65.6 ms ] threadHe seemed mostly checked out about a decade ago. Before Larry did. Basically right after G+ failed. More of a figurehead. And then not even that anymore.
If you have skills, you can get a job. If you have a degree, you can get a job. If you can GDB, you can get a job. You just have to go out and get one.
> If you spent years and tens of thousands of dollars earning a degree, companies' hiring people without that credential might feel frustrating. The change could leave graduates wondering if their time and money were well-spent.
> AI's popularity also creates environmental pressures. Training and running AI systems requires tons of electricity and water for cooling data centers. As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, operations, and daily business functions, energy consumption grows.
> This can strain power grids, increase costs for consumers, and contribute to pollution if the electricity comes from sources such as gas or coal. AI may help optimize some clean energy systems, but its resource demands present trade-offs.
> What's being done about changing hiring practices? The business community is recognizing that degree requirements often screen out talented people unnecessarily.
Frankly it seems like a pretty weird thing to say to a group of college students. What does he want them to take away from it? “Just apply now”? “You’re not that great”?
I think degrees are useful for comparing candidates with no experience (work or project experience, that is), but beyond that have little value. Especially when the candidate's university years were a decade or longer ago. If you've been working for at least a couple years I won't really look at your education at all.
Another statement from Google way back said that 14% of their engineers had no degree whatsoever.
Some of the best engineers I know don't even have a college degree.
with that in mind, It fills me with general revulsion at the idea that "overlooking credentialism as long as they can do the job to a high standard" is "concerning." I want new engineers to have access to the same Ladder I had access to when I was up and comming.
In my case, I have CS degree and work as SWE but I probably would've been fine with just my Data Structures & Algos course as I already had programming experience.
Are computational theory, circuits 101, discrete math, logic 101, etc necessary for being a good SWE? Probably not, but they do probably expand your mind a bit.
I never "require" a degree in the job postings I put out here. I don't even mention it.
But they always had a good number of people with no degrees or degrees wholly unrelated to computers.
Glad I didn't spend another 8 years and instead took a job at AWS.
My how things have changed!